


I'm going to tell you a story

by Em_Jaye



Series: The Long Way Around [6]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Time Travel, F/M, Fix-It, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Gen, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slow Everything, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 07:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19902205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Em_Jaye/pseuds/Em_Jaye
Summary: Woody Allen once said, 'If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans." With that in mind, Darcy had to wonder if there was anyone who could make God laugh quite like Steve Rogers.June 1971: Scrabble





	I'm going to tell you a story

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: descriptions of war (WW2 and Vietnam), mentions of PTSD, and talk of conditions within concentration camps.

June 1971

She could hear the rise and fall of voices of news anchors as she fumbled with shuffling her grocery bags and purse to one hand to dig her keys from her pocket. Her key was halfway in the lock when the knob turned, and Steve opened the door for her.

He took the bags from her with one hand and the mail she’d been holding beneath her chin with the other. She smiled in gratitude, but what she got in return was tight and faded too soon. “You okay?” she asked, following him into the kitchen to unload the grocery bags.

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug as he turned and opened the cabinets. “You’re home early.”

She blinked and glanced at the clock. “I guess so,” she admitted before she raised an eyebrow. “Were you counting on me being later?”

“No,” he shook his head. “I was just watching the news.”

She watched him put away the pasta and cans of soup. Not looking at her. Tension stitched all the way up his back and shoulders. Darcy frowned and sat down at their little wobbly kitchen table to go through the mail, sorting the small amount of envelopes and fliers into piles for Steven Grant and Darcy Barrett. Most nights she didn’t get home from work in time to watch the news. If she missed anything, Steve filled her in when he came to pick her up. She skimmed the papers and the copies of _Newsweek_ that crossed the counter at the diner, but the non-stop coverage of the war, the protests, and the general chaos and depression the country was slipping toward felt a little too familiar.

It took some of the shiny off letting her pretend that living in the past was still fun. Like they’d done this on purpose—an extended vacation to Seventies Land. That it was fine that they’d been here a year without a single lead. That every day they spent here didn’t chip away a little more at the optimism she was clinging to so hard she was breaking her nails.

She let her chin fall on her hand and studied him a moment longer. “Did something happen?” she asked.

Steve closed the cabinet doors and turned back, shaking his head again. “No,” he leaned against the counter and folded his arms. “Why?”

Darcy raised her eyebrows. “Just wondering,” she said lightly before she got up from the table and wandered into the living room. The idea of dragging the source of Steve’s bad mood out of him over the course of the night wasn’t all that attractive. She dropped down onto the couch and turned her attention to the television and the story on Vietnam.

The footage was the shaky, crackling picture that Darcy remembered from her history and poli-sci classes. Shots of muddy-faced GIs, bullets raining from helicopters, explosions filmed high above a canopy of sweltering jungle. It left a sour taste in her mouth, knowing how long this had already gone on, how much longer it would linger as a choke hold on an entire generation.

She remembered what her father had said about his older brother, Joel, who’d been drafted when he was only eighteen. He said the war had bruised his soul—that when Joel had come home, it seemed like it hurt him to try to live a normal life again. Like everything he had to do—even sleeping—was painful in a way that her dad, at fifteen, couldn’t understand.

She’d never met her uncle Joel. He’d died before she was born, and her father never talked about how.

Darcy looked over from the screen and the footage of a village littered with burned out structures, surprised to find that Steve had joined her. He sat in the armchair and dropped his elbow on the armrest, a fist curled in front of his mouth, his eyes glued to the screen.

She pressed her lips together before she cleared her throat. “Steve?”

“Hmm?” He didn’t look at her.

“Do you watch this every night?”

Steve’s expression didn’t change. “Yeah,” he said after what felt like a long time.

“Why?” The footage was horrible; watching more than a few minutes—knowing how many more horrors _weren’t_ being broadcast and how many ugly secrets and lies would come to light eventually—made her stomach turn. She couldn’t watch it without thinking of the polaroid photos taped up in the backroom of the diner. Boys who were overseas while their parents and siblings, girlfriends and wives, waited tables and counted each day without bad news as a victory. The boys in those photos looked like babies. Patchy facial hair. Bright eyes. Crooked teeth.

He dropped his hand and Darcy could see his throat bob with a hard swallow. “When I got out of the ice,” he said quietly. “And I started catching up on what I missed…” he nodded toward the screen. “This was the one I couldn’t wrap my head around. I kept reading about it—trying to make it make sense. Ten years of letting kids get slaughtered every day—ripping the whole country apart like this—no exit strategy? No real…” he stopped and shook his head. “But seeing it like this—”

“It’s different,” Darcy agreed when Steve stopped himself. “I know. I used to think I knew everything about this stuff,” she said. “But learning about it in history class isn’t exactly the same as watching it happen in real time.”

He shook his head gently and Darcy could tell they weren’t talking about the same thing. “It just makes me wonder…”

She bit her lip. “Wonder what?”

“If it wasn’t all for nothing.”

The station switched to a blaringly loud and cheerful commercial for Coors that made Darcy jump to her feet and switch it off with a heavy _click_. She sat back down on the couch, but on the side closest to Steve so that, if he wanted, he could just turn a little to the left to face her.

He didn’t, but she made herself go on anyway. “I read somewhere that World War II was the last war we fought for any real reason,” she chewed her lip again. “The last one where we did any good.”

“Yeah,” Steve said gruffly. “I read that too.” He pressed on his knuckles and shook his head again. “I just…I see this shit and I can’t—I guess it’s just hard to believe we were all that naïve.”

“What do you mean?”

He turned the chair a few inches in her direction, but still didn’t look at her. “The reason we all clambered to sign up in ’41—it wasn’t just because we wanted to do the right thing. We did,” he added quickly. “We wanted to stop Hitler and make sure what was happening in Europe stopped and couldn’t ever happen again, but it was more than that.” Darcy shifted on the couch and folded a leg beneath herself, waiting for him to continue. “When the recruiter talked to Bucky—when they talked to all of us, really—they told us that if we did this. If we made this sacrifice and went and helped win this war, then that would be it. That we’d do this and then our children and our grandchildren wouldn’t ever have to.” The corner of his lips lifted into a sad half-smile. “Seems stupid now, in hindsight. But that lie…” he shook his head again. “We didn’t _want_ to be there, y’know? We didn’t want to be killing people and sludging through the ice and snow and watching our friends get picked off one by one, but we did it.” His jaw clenched again. “We did it because they made us believe that no one else would ever have to.” He glanced up and over at her finally. “Someone told me once—a while ago—that everything I did back then…everything I thought I died for was a lie. And most of the time, I don’t believe it but.” He stopped and his eyes flicked to the black TV screen.

Darcy felt her mouth run dry at this confession. She wet her lips and forced her brain to work faster, to not let the silence go on to long, to say something, _anything_ that would make Steve realize he hadn’t made a mistake in sharing it with her. But when she opened her mouth, all that came out was, “Steve—”

It was the wrong thing to say. It broke whatever spell had made him start talking in the first place. Darcy watched, heart sinking, as he blinked a few times and got to his feet. “I’m uh—I’m going to go for a walk,” he said, motioning to the door.

“Okay,” she said quietly. She knew better than to ask if he wanted company.

He didn’t say anything else as he grabbed his keys and closed the door quietly behind him. Darcy pulled her other leg up onto the couch and gave her knees a hug. “Fuck you, Vietnam,” she said aloud to her empty apartment.

***

It weighed on her all the next day—distracting her from her morning shift at the diner, making her burn the coffee and nearly drop a whole tray of dirty dishes on the way back to the dish pit. Junie was understanding, though Darcy caught the way she emphasized the word _day_ when she said anyone could have a bad one now and then.

She cleaned the apartment when she got home. Steve was still at work—he’d been leaving as she was getting up that morning—so she vacuumed the carpets and did the dishes and left the dusting for him and super-soldier, allergy-free lungs to do when he felt better. Not that she’d know when he was feeling better.

If she knew Steve—and she had to assume that after living with someone for a year, she knew him at least a little bit—he’d act like everything was fine when he came home. That he’d pretend he’d never said what he had the night before and that mentioning it would be a stupid and futile gesture.

So, she waited for him to come home, acting—as she’d expected—like he was fine. They made small talk about work before he went to take a shower and she tried to decide if it was worth doing what she was about to.

“Do you want to play Scrabble?”

Steve seemed surprised that this was the question waiting for him when he returned to the living room with clean clothes and wet hair. “Uh, sure?” he shrugged. “I guess?”

“Good,” she said and slid down to the space between the couch and the coffee table and lifted the box from where she’d stuffed it under the table the last time she’d strong-armed him into a game.

There was still a notebook and a golf pencil in the box with the board and tiles and Darcy slid them across the table as Steve wordlessly—and still looking mildly surprised by his own compliance—sat down across from her on the floor.

She set the cloth bag of letters between them and selected her tiles first, lining them up on her ledge, willing herself to say what she wanted to say. “You go first,” she instructed, uncertain she could look at him while she went on. “I’m going to tell you a story.”

“A story?” he repeated skeptically.

“Yep,” she said evenly and motioned for him to begin their game. “And you can’t interrupt; it’s a very important story.” She waited until he set down his first letter—an _s_ to spell out _salsa_ —to continue. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Ruth. Ruth lived in Poland with her family—her parents, three sisters and one brother. And for the first seven years of her life, everything was cool. She went to school, she was happy and healthy,” Darcy studied her tiles and added three letters to the last _a_ to make _apex._ “But then one day,” she let her gaze flick up to his for a moment while she dug for three new tiles, “these arm-band wearing motherfuckers rolled into town and everything got real bad, real fast.”

Steve’s expression had gone from mild curiosity to grim realization before he looked down at the notepad and tallied up the points on her side. He studied his ledge intently, looking for a new word, while she continued.

“They shot her brother in front of her, and they put her father on one train, her mother and her twin sisters on another, and they put Ruth and her oldest sister on a different train to a horrible place called Neuengamme.” She watched Steve glance up again and she took it as reassurance that she’d pronounced the name of the camp correctly. It had been a long time since she’d heard this story—and she’d never told it out loud. “And at that horrible place,” she went on while Steve spelled out _soap_ , “those arm-band-wearing motherfuckers made Ruth and her sister and all the little girls like them dig ditches until the skin on their hands cracked and bled. They shaved their heads and took their shoes away. And they hardly fed them, and they made them drink contaminated water and Ruth—even though she was only eight years old—Ruth thought that she was going to die in that horrible place. Like so many other little girls.”

Steve’s hand stopped midway through marking himself down for eight points.

“But the water was the worst,” Darcy shook her head and shifted her letters around, willing a word to emerge. “The water made everything worse. It made her sister so sick she couldn’t eat. And Ruth watched her get sicker and smaller until one night she decided she had to do something to help her. So, she sneaked out of her bunk in the middle of the night to try to steal fresh water from the soldiers’ supply.” Darcy glanced up again and then back down at the board. She took the _l_ from _salsa_ to spell _tall._ “She was small enough that she could squeeze through the door to the bunkhouse and she made it about halfway to the soldier’s water pump before someone grabbed her by the back of her neck and spun her around. Ruth recognized the man who’d grabbed her, and she _knew_ for sure that she was going to die. This soldier was a particularly brutal bastard by reputation, and never killed anyone at the camp until he made sure they’d suffered first. And this man looked down at Ruth—skinny, terrified, eight-year-old Ruth—and he _smiled._ ” Darcy looked up to see that Steve’s jaw had tightened to a harsh square. He’d stopped keeping score on the notepad. That part of the story had always made her blood run cold. When she was a little girl, it had been enough to make her pull the covers up to her eyes and almost ask to hear something else. But she’d always waited—made herself be brave—because the next part made it worth it.

“He put his gun in her face and he asked her what she was doing. But she was so scared, she couldn’t speak. He kept asking again, and again what she was doing, walking toward her so she backed up, up and up until she was backed up against the chemical shed. He put his gun in her mouth and told her she had one more chance to tell him the truth—but just as he was about to pull the trigger, there was an explosion from the other side of the camp wall.

He turned around to see what it was. And there was _another_ explosion—closer to the gate this time. Ruth heard a bunch of the guards shouting to each other, grabbing their weapons, running toward the sound. The soldier who had Ruth had to go too. So he grabbed her again and shoved her into the chemical shed and told her to say her prayers until he came back. He chained it shut and left her there.

But there was a window in the chemical shed. It was way at the top, but Ruth was tiny and a good climber—so she climbed up on to the shelves to try to see what was happening. All she could see was group after group of guards running toward the gate with their guns. Some of the trees on the other side of the wall were on fire and she heard gunshots from every direction. When the last group of guards left the camp, they chained and barricaded the gate behind them so no one could escape while they were gone. Ruth waited, crouched on that top shelf, staring out the window all night, waiting for them to come back—waiting to die when they did.

But all night, no one came. The sounds outside the camp—the gunshots, the yelling, the explosions—went on for hours and then stopped all at once, just before dawn. And Ruth kept waiting until finally, a man came to the gate.” Darcy felt herself smile as she made herself look up and make sure Steve was listening. “A man with a shield with a big, white star. He broke the chains, and he opened the gates, and he let the Allies in.” She waited until he looked up again before she swallowed the lump that had risen in her throat and smiled again. “And that’s the story of how Captain America saved my grandmother and a couple million people just like her.”

Steve glanced back down at the board and shook his head. “Darcy—”

She reached out and placed her hand on his arm. “So please don’t think that what you did was for nothing, Steve. Or think that the only thing you did was stop Hydra from winning the war—because you did a lot more than that.” She watched him run his bottom lip between his teeth before he nodded, slowly. She cleared her throat. “And listen, I know you’re not going to stop watching the footage every night and torturing yourself,” she went on. “But can you do me a favor and just…” she shrugged. “I don’t know. Let me watch it with you?”

She didn’t like the idea of him sitting in their empty apartment, being reminded with each televised explosion or barrage of bullets of all the wars he’d seen and fought himself. The things that still woke him up in the middle of the night with nightmares and flashbacks she could hear through the thin, shared wall.

He looked up with a half-smile. “You hate watching this stuff on the news,” he reminded.

“Yeah, well,” her shoulder bounced again. “You hate Johnny Carson and you still watch that with me every night.”

He rolled his eyes. “I don’t _hate_ Johnny Carson. I just don’t think he’s the end-all-be-all that everyone always said he was.”

Darcy scoffed. “Okay, if grown-up Ruth? My Grams, I just mentioned? If she heard you say that, she would not care that you were the one who liberated her from a concentration camp, she would challenge you to a fistfight.”

To her relief, he laughed and shook his head. “If she’s as scrappy as you are, I might be a little nervous.”

Darcy grinned. “Where do you think I got all this scrap from? My mom, the mild-mannered science nerd?” She shook her head and tapped a fingernail on the board between them. “Your turn, by the way.”

Steve studied his tiles for only a second before he gained himself seventeen points by using the _t_ in _tall_ to spell out _thanks._

**Author's Note:**

> **Steve's comments on why so many enlisted in '41 is derived from the saddest conversation I ever had with my grandfather--a man who was awarded a Silver Star for bravery in WWII and spent every minute of the rest of his life being the most outspoke anti-war advocate I've had the pleasure of knowing. 
> 
> (Also, this is a reimagining of Ruth's story as told in my other work, "The Man with a Shield". That version is better, in my opinion, and more impactful. But I work with what spoons I have and this moment felt important to me.)
> 
> Come play with me on tumblr: @idontgettechnology and join me at ishipitpod.com for weekly podcast on fandom and fanfic by yours truly. 
> 
> *kisses*


End file.
